The 2026 AI Pioneer Award Winners Are …

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significant due to its potential to revolutionize various aspects of life and work by enhancing efficiency, automating tasks, and generating valuable insights according to the University of Cincinnati. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and learn from it enables it to improve decision-making, personalize experiences, and solve complex problems across diverse fields. Today AI is helping improve lending, but those companies that are using this technology are not getting recognized. That changes now. PROGRESS in Lending has launched the first ever AI Award dedicated to lending. The 2026 AI Pioneer Award winners in alphabetical order are …

ACES Quality Management developed ACES Intelligence®, the financial service industry’s first AI-powered quality control (QC) engine, to remove the manual bottlenecks that have long shaped how mortgage QC gets done. ACES launched ACES Intelligence in September 2025 with early adopters such as Georgia’s Own Credit Union and compliance consulting firm CrossCheck Compliance LLC reporting measurable time savings, including hours saved per full audit. Over 50% increase in client adoption since they launched in September 2025. ACES Intelligence empowers users to write exceptions, build loan selection queries in plain English, and summarize audits in seconds, dramatically cutting exception writing time. Key capabilities include:

• Executive Summaries: Instantly generate narratives that outline selection methods, defect statistics and key findings, delivering actionable insights in seconds.

• Criteria Builder (natural language processing): Generate advanced loan selection criteria faster by describing filters in plain English that eliminate tedious clicks.

• Exception Comment Summaries: Access a roll-up view of exceptions found in an audit and generate summaries of findings noted in comments.

• PII Detection: Automatically identify sensitive information such as Social Security and credit card numbers, reducing the risk of exposure.

• Writing Assistant and Comment Analysis: Ensure professional writing and regulatory citation, improving clarity and accuracy with a single click.

Users describe the impact in direct terms. “We turn hours into minutes with ACES Intelligence,” said Emilee Rada, senior manager of lending operations at Georgia’s Own Credit Union. Todd Krell, a partner at CrossCheck Compliance LLC, said implementing the tool “has been a game-changer,” freeing his management staff from rewriting findings and analyzing audits so they can dedicate more attention to clients. Audit automation removes the manual effort of setting up, documenting and reporting an audit, freeing quality control staff to spend more time on the judgment-based work of verifying loan quality itself. For lenders, that means audits move faster without a corresponding drop in rigor, at a moment when quality control teams are under growing pressure to do more with the staff they already have.

AFN employs a proprietary AI engine that uses a large language model trained on scads of loan data and program guidelines and can now determine requirements for each new loan at each phase of the loan process. Based on that determination, this dynamic AI engine will either trigger a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bot to perform the task or queue it when human input is required. This amazing AI engine has learned thousands of tasks that may be required in the course of a loan, as well as more than 1,100 documents or requirements needed to process, underwrite, and ultimately close a mortgage loan. The “assembly line” mentality is long gone at AFN, as tasks are easily executed concurrently by multiple parties and by the AI engine itself. Standard 30-day closings are becoming a thing of the past as AI makes the dream of 15-day closings a reality.

With each transaction, it gets “smarter” and more useful to AFN employees. It is not meant to replace humans in the AFN workforce, but to simplify their workflow so they can multiply their caseload without sacrificing quality of service or compliance. AFN is proud to utilize AI in these exciting, innovative ways, as it moves onward and upward in ways some of its competitors have yet to imagine. In addition to vastly improving the homebuyer’s/homeowner’s experience and assisting production and operations with their tasks, AFN’s AI engine is used to provide more accurate forecasts and detailed action items to help maximize profitability. Internal chatbots are deployed to cover everything from loan data to benefits and Human Resources (HR) data. AFN’s MLOs benefit from AI assistants that help schedule appointments, follow up on leads, identify refinance opportunities, assist applicants with prequalification, and more. AI can also create personalized marketing collateral and ads geared toward each MLO’s database and audience of prospective homebuyers and homeowners. External chatbots can answer applicant questions in a way that is tailored to conversion, walk applicants through the application process, and improve their overall experience. AI can analyze loan eligibility, flag roadblocks, and identify the best programs and rates for loan applicants based on their financial situation.

The positive change this proprietary AI engine enables extends to every stakeholder. Borrowers experience faster processing, greater transparency, and fewer delays. Referral partners gain confidence from speed and consistency. Loan officers reclaim time previously lost to manual follow-up and administrative coordination. Underwriters focus on judgment—the work only they can do. And as AFN scales toward 200 agents across the full loan lifecycle, the system becomes a compounding advantage: each new agent extends the platform, each resolved edge case improves the model, and each closed loan adds to a growing base of proprietary intelligence.

Blue Sage Solutions has reimagined how artificial intelligence fits into mortgage lending by embedding AI directly into the core of its cloud-native Digital Lending and Digital Servicing platforms—built in, not bolted on. The result, the Blue Sage AI suite, is a unified framework that brings intelligent document analysis, workflow automation, underwriting support, predictive analytics, and conversational AI natively into every stage of the mortgage lifecycle—from first borrower contact through origination and into servicing. SageVision, Blue Sage’s Intelligent Document Analysis solution, goes beyond legacy OCR and automated data recognition by automatically classifying documents, validating information across documents, and extracting key data from the many document types found in a mortgage file. It evaluates documents against lender-specific guidelines and overlays, surfacing clear, warn, or flag recommendations for underwriters to review.

Rather than replacing underwriters, Blue Sage AI provides recommendations that help lenders identify exceptions earlier and make faster, more informed decisions.It also performs automated financial analysis that helps identify undisclosed liabilities, unverified deposits, and other risk indicators earlier in the lending process—catching issues before they become costly downstream exceptions. Blue Sage AI also extends into servicing, where voice AI powers borrower interactions after loan transfers. This includes AI-driven welcome calls with real-time sentiment analysis and adaptive conversation flow, automated identity verification, and guidance on payments, escrow, and servicing questions. Outbound workflows, including employment verification calls and servicing notifications, are automated in a way that scales without adding operational headcount. Taken together, these capabilities allow Blue Sage lenders to complete loan processing tasks up to 90% faster and automate more than 70 processes across retail, correspondent, and wholesale channels while maintaining the compliance rigor that mortgage lending demands.

Rather than layering disconnected AI tools onto existing systems, Blue Sage embeds intelligence directly into its platform architecture, enabling lenders to close loans faster, lower operational costs, and deliver a better experience for both employees and borrowers. What sets Blue Sage apart as an AI Pioneer is this combination of depth and breadth: AI that touches sales engagement, document intelligence, underwriting support, and servicing, all built on a genuine understanding of how loans actually move through origination and servicing and the compliance obligations that govern every step. That combination of domain expertise and embedded AI architecture is what makes the Blue Sage AI suite a meaningful advance for the lending industry, not just another AI feature, but a fundamentally different approach to modern mortgage lending.

Experian’s Agentic Insights Platform (homegrown) is a governed AI product solution for data-driven intelligence, pioneered by Experian Housing that delivers results across the housing business. It is a reusable, domain-agnostic AI-for-BI foundation that powers AI-driven analytics and actionable insights across the entire housing lifecycle: rental, prospecting, origination, servicing, secondary-market intelligence, and data quality. The platform replaces the traditional analytics model of scarce SQL capacity, manual extracts, and days of decision-making drag. Business users, product managers, and analysts simply ask questions in natural language.

A multi-agent AI workflow maps each question to governed KPI definitions via a controlled, managed semantic layer, generates and validates SQL, verifies the answer against the underlying data, and returns an explained, confidence-scored insight within minutes. With both short-term and long-term memory, the platform carries context across conversations and learns from prior interactions, so insights get sharper with use. The impact is measurable: a 50-60% improvement in ad hoc analytics and data visualization productivity. Beyond speed, the AI works dynamically across the governed semantic layer and KPIs to proactively surface insights that static dashboards and manual analysis would never find. That includes turning data quality into a proactive product capability, with a high-level data quality management and recommendation engine that protects the reliability of every lending decision built on the data. Most importantly, the platform is built within the regulatory guardrails of a highly regulated industry, with trust engineered in as a product capability rather than bolted on. The entire architecture runs exclusively on Experian AI Security and Safety-approved components, with strict access and persona controls enforced through OKTA integration.

LLM behavior is controlled within the governed semantic layer and KPI definitions, meaning agents can operate only on approved data, logic, and terminology. Every answer passes a hallucination check against actual query results, carries an explainability trace and confidence score, and is captured in an end-to-end audit trail ready for risk and compliance review. Governed KPIs, not LLMs, remain the system of record, and nothing unvalidated ever reaches a chart or a recommendation. The architecture is also built for responsible AI economics. Every agent in the workflow is independently configurable for the type of LLM it uses, enabling the right-sized model for each task, ongoing token-cost optimization, and disciplined AI budget controls as adoption scales. Because every capability is domain-agnostic by design, the same foundation is positioned to extend to Verifications and Employer Services Solutions, and other Experian businesses. What began in Housing is becoming an enterprise pattern for trusted AI, and lending is leading the way. The Agentic Insights Platform proves the industry does not have to choose between AI speed and regulatory rigor. With the right architecture, it gets both.

Few companies are a more natural fit for the AI Pioneers Award than one that pioneered an entirely new category of AI in mortgage lending. Friday Harbor did exactly that with AI pre-underwriting. Its platform evaluates loan files as they are being assembled, analyzing borrower documents and loan data against program guidelines, lender overlays, and investor requirements to identify documentation gaps and guideline conflicts, anticipate potential underwriting conditions, and provide actionable guidance for resolving issues before the file reaches underwriting. By helping loan officers and processors address potential problems earlier, Friday Harbor reduces downstream rework and gives underwriters cleaner, more complete files to review.

Over the past 12 months, Friday Harbor has pushed AI pre-underwriting beyond conventional loan scenarios to condominium, manufactured housing, USDA, non-QM, and jumbo lending by tackling challenges the category had never attempted: lender- and investor-specific overlays, full appraisal files including photos, and complex income and asset qualification. The company also prioritized open APIs and integrations with Encompass, MeridianLink Mortgage, and Calyx Path so lenders could access those capabilities inside the systems they already use. What began as a new approach to AI just two years ago is now operating at meaningful scale. More than 40 lenders use Friday Harbor today, including three of the nation’s 15 largest independent mortgage banks, and the platform supports loan volume equivalent to roughly 0.5% of all U.S. mortgage originations.

More important than adoption alone is what happens to those loans: lenders using Friday Harbor see pull-through improve by 5% to 10%, fulfillment productivity increase by 2–3X, and clear-to-close timelines improve by one to five days. Those aggregate results are showing up in markedly different lender environments. NewFed Mortgage increased monthly processor capacity by 36% and underwriting capacity by 35%, allowing the lender to support more production without adding fulfillment staff at the same rate. Waterstone Mortgage shortened its average application-to-clear-to-close cycle by more than six days. Partners Bank has used Friday Harbor to close complex FHA loans in as few as seven days. Together, these outcomes show that AI pre-underwriting is no longer simply a new idea. Friday Harbor has turned it into a production technology capable of materially changing the economics, speed, and consistency of mortgage origination.

HomeLight is transforming the lending experience by applying artificial intelligence across the home financing and closing journey. Rather than using AI solely to answer questions or automate isolated tasks, HomeLight has built an AI-powered ecosystem that helps lenders, borrowers, and settlement professionals reduce operational friction, make better decisions, and close transactions more efficiently. At the center of this innovation is EVA, HomeLight’s Escrow Virtual Assistant. Residential real estate closings remain one of the most manual stages of the mortgage process, often requiring more than 120 repetitive tasks across dozens of disconnected systems. As the real estate industry’s first agentic AI-powered escrow officer, EVA autonomously manages much of this operational work using more than 80 integrated tools, including processing incoming orders, monitoring email inboxes, retrieving HOA and tax documents, coordinating with lenders, collecting borrower information, and initiating wire transfers.

Instead of replacing escrow professionals, EVA enables them to focus on exception cases, problem-solving, and customer service while improving efficiency, reducing operational risk, and increasing transaction capacity. HomeLight also applies AI to help lenders and borrowers overcome one of the biggest financing challenges facing existing homeowners: buying a new home before selling their current one. HomeLight’s Buy Before You Sell financing solution uses artificial intelligence to evaluate a homeowner’s existing property, estimate its marketability, and determine how much equity can safely be unlocked to fund a down payment, moving expenses, or closing costs. The program provides a 0% bridge loan, enabling qualified borrowers to access up to 90% of the equity in their departing residence while making contingency-free, cash-backed offers on their next home. To date, HomeLight has unlocked more than $884 million in equity through Buy Before You Sell. The program helps lenders close loans up to five times faster, achieve significantly higher close rates, and enables buyers to save an average of 3.5% on the purchase price of their next home through stronger negotiating power.

By combining predictive intelligence with agentic AI that performs meaningful operational work, HomeLight is redefining how artificial intelligence supports the lending industry. From helping borrowers unlock equity with greater confidence to automating one of the industry’s most labor-intensive closing processes, HomeLight is delivering measurable improvements in efficiency, accuracy, security, and customer outcomes while setting a new standard for AI-powered lending innovation.

MortgageFlex is using artificial intelligence to improve the lending business by embedding AI into the loan lifecycle in a way that is practical, governed, and built for the realities of mortgage compliance. Through LoanQuest Origination and LoanQuest Servicing, MortgageFlex is not simply adding AI as a separate feature; the company is creating an operating framework that allows lenders to safely apply AI across origination, fulfillment, servicing, and borrower engagement. The philosophy is straightforward: AI recommends, workflow governs, and the system executes. In a highly regulated industry, AI must do more than accelerate work. It must operate inside defined policies, approval structures, audit trails, and business rules.

MortgageFlex has designed its AI strategy around that principle, ensuring that automation enhances human expertise rather than replacing lender judgment or weakening control. In LoanQuest Origination, AI helps reduce manual effort and improve loan production quality. AI-assisted document recognition, data validation, and exception identification can help lenders identify missing information earlier, reduce repetitive review tasks, and improve the accuracy of loan files before they move through underwriting and closing. When combined with configurable workflow automation, lenders can route conditions, trigger follow-up activity, surface exceptions, and prioritize work more consistently across teams. A key differentiator is that MortgageFlex connects AI to real lending workflows through a controlled automation layer. Instead of relying on disconnected scripts or unmanaged robotic processes, the tool’s architecture allows AI-driven insights to interact with the same business rules, screens, tasks, and workflow steps used by lending staff. This helps institutions gain the benefit of intelligent automation while preserving transparency, accountability, and operational discipline.

That same approach extends into LoanQuest Servicing. Servicers can use AI-enabled workflows to support borrower communication, exception management, task routing, document review, and operational follow-up throughout the life of the loan. By connecting origination and servicing on a common technology foundation, MortgageFlex helps lenders reduce silos and create a more continuous view of the borrower relationship. MortgageFlex also recognizes that every lender will adopt AI at a different pace. The open architecture is designed to support third-party AI tools, client-developed agents, and MortgageFlex-enabled workflows within a governed framework. This gives institutions flexibility to innovate while maintaining control over approvals, auditability, data usage, and compliance oversight. The business impact is meaningful. AI and automation can help lenders process loans faster, reduce operational friction, improve data quality, shorten cycle times, strengthen compliance controls, and create more responsive borrower experiences. Just as important, MortgageFlex gives lenders a responsible path to scale AI without introducing unmanaged risk.

A mortgage is the biggest financial decision most people will ever make, and too often, it’s one of the most stressful, filled with jargon, waiting, and uncertainty about what happens next. nCino is tackling that stress through its Agentic Homeownership Journey, where connected AI capabilities across the entire mortgage experience address the friction that slows borrowers, loan officers, and loan files down. From answering borrower questions to preparing files for approval, and identifying new opportunities after closing, AI takes on work throughout the process so people can focus their time where human judgment and relationships matter most.

Borrower questions bring progress to a halt when answers depend on reaching a loan officer or processor during business hours. Mortgage Advisor, nCino’s GenAI borrower experience, eliminates that waiting by giving borrowers immediate help understanding their loan status, evaluating options, and understanding why information is being requested so they can complete required tasks and keep the process moving. As the loan takes shape, the work required to turn an application into an approvable loan file creates delays at every turn. nCino addresses those delays with a series of interconnected AI capabilities. Doc Validation catches incomplete or incorrect document uploads, while Doc VOI automates income verification from uploaded pay stubs and W-2s. Loan PreCheck checks the loan against all five major agency guideline sets in seconds. AUS Smart Tasks then interprets underwriting findings and recommends specific next steps loan officers can act on or automate. AI also turns closed loans into new opportunities. nCino’s Refi Opportunity Analyzer continuously scans a lender’s closed-loan portfolio against real-time rate data to surface prime refinance candidates with savings projections, turning an existing book of business into a revenue-generating pipeline.

Each of these capabilities solves a meaningful problem on its own. Together, they demonstrate what makes nCino’s approach to AI pioneering: applying connected AI capabilities across the homeownership journey to eliminate friction, expand loan team capacity, and clear the path for borrowers, resulting in less overwhelm and more control during one of life’s most celebrated moments.

Ocrolus is an AI-powered workflow and analytics platform that transforms messy financial documents and digital data into structured, regulatory-grade decision intelligence for mortgage lenders, small business lenders and financial institutions. The platform uses specialized language models trained on domain-specific financial data rather than relying solely on general-purpose large language models. This approach supports high-precision data extraction across documents such as bank statements, pay stubs and tax forms. A production-grade inference layer enables consistent performance at scale, while a four-layer evaluation framework combines human-validated ground truth, AI-based evaluation techniques, deterministic validation rules and continuous benchmarking.

Together, these capabilities allow Ocrolus to deliver more than 99% accuracy while maintaining traceability from each output back to its source document. This combination of precision and explainability helps lenders minimize manual review, strengthen quality control and make more confident decisions. For the mortgage market in particular, Ocrolus is expanding automation across the underwriting workflow to improve both the borrower and lender experience. Its automated conditioning capability generates consistent, explainable underwriting conditions across assets, income and credit and integrates directly with Encompass® by ICE Mortgage Technology. Each condition is linked to the borrower document, data point or guideline that prompted it, helping lenders support transparent, defensible and audit-ready decisions. This capability builds on Inspect, Ocrolus’ discrepancy management and conditioning solution. Inspect compares borrower-submitted documents with loan application data in real time, identifying potential mismatches, unsupported assets, inconsistent income and missing documentation earlier in the underwriting process.

Recent enhancements allow lenders to create custom conditions, connect those conditions to specific discrepancies, and synchronize updates with the Encompass Form 1003. This helps close the gap between document review and underwriting action. Across the broader platform, Ocrolus automates document classification, indexing, data extraction and income analysis for both traditional wage earners and borrowers with more complex financial profiles, including self-employed borrowers and applicants using bank statement lending programs. A direct integration with Fannie Mae’s Income Calculator further supports standardized and efficient income assessment for lenders. The resulting operational impact is significant. Lenders using Ocrolus have reported up to a 75% reduction in underwriter touches per loan and the ability to double loan volume capacity without increasing staff. Individual customers have reduced underwriting time by 29% and increased processing capacity by 50%, while maintaining consistent, auditable outputs delivered in minutes rather than hours.

Optimal Blue is using AI to transform mortgage forecasting from a largely static exercise into a continuously updated decision-making tool that helps lenders respond faster and plan with greater confidence. Virtual Economist, the mortgage industry’s first and only AI- and machine learning-powered forecasting solution, delivers real-time forecasts for mortgage rates and market volume along with instant scenario analysis. Virtual Economist combines proprietary machine learning models with public economic data and Optimal Blue’s exclusive lock volume data, which reflects 35% of all mortgages locked nationwide. Unlike traditional forecasting methods that rely on static reports, spreadsheets, or periodic analyst updates, Virtual Economist makes market intelligence accessible through a conversational interface. Users can ask complex business questions using voice or text and receive immediate visual forecasts with explanations of the factors driving them.

For example, users can explore scenarios involving the 10-year Treasury, mortgage-backed securities spreads, and the primary-secondary spread to evaluate potential market shifts. Analysis that once required weeks of analyst time can now be completed in minutes, helping lenders respond faster to changing market conditions. Capital markets teams can use these insights to inform hedge strategies, lock management, and rate sheet pricing during market volatility, while executive teams can make more informed decisions about staffing, production planning, capacity management, and investor reporting. Virtual Economist’s forecasts are also designed to be transparent and explainable. Its conversational interface explains the economic drivers behind each forecast, and allows for what-ifs and follow up questions, making sophisticated analysis accessible to business leaders without specialized data science expertise.

Virtual Economist’s impact extends beyond Optimal Blue’s clients. Beginning with the July Market Advantage mortgage data report, Optimal Blue began making Virtual Economist insights freely available to the broader mortgage industry through the monthly report. The report now includes 12-month forecasts for the OBMMI 30-year conforming fixed rate and primary-secondary spread, giving mortgage professionals a forward-looking view alongside Optimal Blue’s market data and analysis. By turning forecasting into a continuous decision-support capability, Virtual Economist helps lenders anticipate market changes, improve pricing strategies, strengthen risk management, and make better-informed decisions across the enterprise. In a market defined by volatile interest rates and thin margins, it sets a new standard for how AI can improve the lending business.

America’s $15 trillion mortgage servicing industry has long relied on outdated technology, creating costly inefficiencies, compliance challenges, and frustrating homeowner experiences. Sagent has changed that by introducing Dara, the industry’s first cloud-native, open-API servicing platform built with artificial intelligence at its core. Unlike legacy systems that layer AI onto decades-old infrastructure, Dara was designed from the ground up to unify the entire servicing lifecycle. Through its integrated Core, Consumer, Default, and Analytics solutions, Dara enables servicers to operate faster, reduce costs, stay compliant, and deliver a more transparent homeowner experience, all from a single platform operating on real-time data.

Sagent has applied AI to one of the industry’s most challenging areas: default servicing. Dara’s AI-driven workflow automation and real-time data streamlines hardship and loss mitigation workflows, helping servicers resolve borrower requests faster while reducing operational costs and complexity. The result is a faster, less stressful experience for homeowners facing financial hardship and a more efficient operation for servicers. Sagent has also redefined how AI can be used to improve compliance. Without our AI solution, servicers and their technology partners spend months monitoring changes that impact almost 9,000 servicing requirements across CFPB regulations, GSE guidelines, FHA, VA, USDA programs, and all 50 states. Dara RegIQ continuously analyzes regulatory changes, compares them against this compliance framework, and pinpoints exactly where operational updates are required. What once took weeks or months of manual review can now be completed in hours or minutes, helping servicers stay ahead of evolving regulations with greater confidence and accuracy. Sagent’s vision for AI extends beyond automation. It is about transforming the servicing experience for both businesses and homeowners. By combining intelligent document processing, real-time compliance monitoring, automated loss mitigation, and cloud-native infrastructure into a single platform, Dara delivers capabilities the industry has never had before.

For example, Ask Dara offers the ability to interact with real-time servicing data from every part of the servicing lifecycle using natural language. Instead of sending a request to an analyst, servicers can have a conversation with Dara to get immediate answers, drill from portfolio-level data down to individual loans, and even bring their own data (such as call center and performance metrics) for even deeper context. Plus, each team member experiences a personalized interaction that’s also configurable for the entire organization. Of course, transparency, auditability, and governance remain paramount throughout every interaction. Most importantly, Sagent’s AI strategy is designed to augment human expertise, not replace it. Every innovation within Dara helps servicing professionals make better decisions, respond faster, and build stronger relationships with homeowners. Through Dara, Sagent is not simply using AI to improve mortgage servicing, it is setting a new standard for what modern servicing can be.

For the past year, Tavant has accelerated its position as an AI-first organization, introducing technologies that are redefining how lenders originate, service, and manage mortgage loans. Rather than treating AI as a feature, Tavant has embedded intelligence across the mortgage lifecycle, from borrower engagement and document analysis to underwriting, servicing, compliance, and software engineering. In less than a year, Tavant has launched several initiatives that together form one of the industry’s most comprehensive AI ecosystems. TOUCHLESS® AI Mortgage Origination Suite Launched in October 2025, TOUCHLESS is Tavant’s AI and Agentic AI powered suite that enables end to end transformation of mortgage origination, from lead to funded loan. It improves the borrower experience, drives lead conversions, reduces origination costs, and compresses cycle times. The suite upgrades existing LOS and POS systems using Agentic AI Assistants, AI powered document analysis, AI assisted underwriting, and an Agentic AI architecture that dynamically personalizes workflows, loan products, and programs, resulting in a 60% reduction in origination time and a 77% decrease in underwriting and processing costs.

TOUCHLESS® Servicing Portal Introduced in February 2026, the TOUCHLESS Servicing Portal extended the platform beyond origination into post close servicing, creating a unified origination and servicing experience on a single platform for the first time. The portal now supports more than 400,000 borrowers nationwide and has achieved an 80% deflection of routine servicing inquiries through self service and guided assistance. MAYA™ Intelligent AI Assistant At the core of TOUCHLESS is MAYA, an intelligent AI assistant that delivers personalized, real time support throughout the mortgage lifecycle for borrowers, loan officers, and underwriters. MAYA helps borrowers navigate complicated questions, make their first payment, explore refinancing, or get help during financial hardship. It guides applicants through the process, explains mortgage products and programs, and responds around the clock to leads, boosting conversion at key moments. Paired with document analysis, MAYA increases underwriter productivity through data consistency checks, automated conditions clearing, and policy as code underwriting. Tavant Platform™ Introduced in June 2026, the Tavant Platform is an agentic software engineering, data modernization, and enterprise AI automation solution. It brings together three layers: Tavant’s AIgnite™ agentic engineering tools, built on coding agents from major AI labs, an optional runtime foundation, and deep domain expertise spanning components, models, agents, and specifications. As coding agents reshape software development, the Platform lets enterprises build automation faster, reduce the cost of running and maintaining it, and minimize lock in. It helps organizations operationalize generative AI across functions like risk, fraud, underwriting, customer service, and operations, moving from ideation to production faster while improving oversight and reducing complexity.

Results Lenders using TOUCHLESS see an average 60% reduction in origination time, 77% lower underwriting and processing costs, roughly $2,000 in savings per loan, a three day reduction in processing times, 15 to 30 basis points of pricing execution improvement, and a 30% reduction in transaction cost. These outcomes reinforce Tavant’s reputation as a technology partner delivering true business transformation, and the Platform extends that vision into how Tavant delivers software.

Veros Real Estate Solutions (Veros) uses artificial intelligence to solve a historical challenge in automated property valuation: accurately and objectively assessing property condition. With the launch of VeroVISION, Veros turns property photos into powerful, objective insights using image recognition technology. VeroVISION scores the physical condition of a property and its individual rooms, rolling these assessments into a single overall condition rating known as the Veros Home Score (VHS). This AI-driven score has a 93% correlation with condition scores provided by human appraisers and inspectors, along with 97% U.S. residential coverage. By incorporating precise property condition into automated valuation models (AVMs) like VeroVALUE Elite, Veros closes the gap on the one variable AVMs previously could not accurately predict. This application of AI dramatically improves the lending business by introducing objectivity and operational efficiency across the housing finance industry:

• Originators and Servicers: Validate property conditions automatically, allowing teams to focus their diligence only on the smaller subset of properties that actually require it.

• Appraisers and Reviewers: Verify and validate that the condition ratings of both subject and comparable properties are accurate via objective, photo-based scores.

• Guarantors and Investors: Utilize independent condition assessments on an individual, portfolio, or pooled-loan basis, while also comparing average property conditions market by market.

• Insurance Companies and Underwriters: Enhance risk modeling, underwriting, and claims assessments through accurate room-level and overall property condition scoring.

Available on a standalone basis or as an integrated analytics add-on, VeroVISION’s automated insights are designed to seamlessly complement human expertise. By empowering housing finance professionals with objective, AI-driven visual data, Veros enables clients to accelerate critical decision-making, improve data selection, and reduce collateral risk through superior comparable selection and outlier detection.

WFG National Title Insurance Company is using artificial intelligence to modernize one of the lending process’s most complex and historically manual components: title production. DecisionPoint®, WFG’s proven title automation platform, builds on more than six years of established automation with an AI-powered layer supporting an automated title commitment. It combines AI with actual title plant data, proprietary business rules, and more than 100 years of title expertise. Unlike solutions that rely primarily on public records, alternative data sources, or predictive models, DecisionPoint applies AI within a traditional title framework grounded in real title data, established underwriting standards, and experienced title professionals. This approach gives lenders the speed, scalability, and intelligence of modern automation while preserving the accuracy, risk management, and confidence they expect from traditional title insurance.

DecisionPoint’s AI-powered workflows automate and accelerate activities that traditionally complicate and prolong the lending process, reducing the time, cost, and friction associated with title production. These activities include bankruptcy, OFAC and other searches; legal and vesting review; title priors; owner-occupancy fraud detection; file triage; and curative workflows; and title commitment preparation. The platform applies consistent business rules, surfaces potential defects, liens, vesting concerns, and other obstacles earlier, and reduces unnecessary manual work and rework. This gives lenders and settlement teams more time to resolve issues before they become closing-day delays or negatively affect the borrower. Straightforward files may move through an automated, touchless commitment workflow. When a file requires additional review or curative work, DecisionPoint routes it to an experienced title professional. Those files still benefit from accelerated, cost-advantaged search automation completed before human intervention. AI does not replace title expertise; it enables professionals to focus their knowledge where judgment, validation, and problem-solving add the greatest value. The result is faster title production, lower per-file expense, more consistent workflows, and greater operational capacity without a proportional increase in staffing or resources.

DecisionPoint helps lenders shorten cycle times, scale more effectively as volumes fluctuate, and create a more predictable path from application to closing. Its customizable workflows and integration options also allow it to work within existing lender and settlement processes, minimizing disruption while maximizing efficiency. DecisionPoint builds on more than six years of proven title automation. Even before the addition of its new AI capabilities, its established automation workflows generated a 15% aggregate lift across purchase and refinance transactions through improved speed, consistency, and workflow efficiency. That result demonstrates the strength of the platform’s proven foundation, rather than the full impact of its new AI-powered capabilities. The latest evolution of DecisionPoint extends beyond those earlier gains. Its AI-powered automated commitment further reduces manual touchpoints, accelerates production, and identifies issues earlier. Files requiring human review also benefit from accelerated foundational search work before a title professional intervenes. By uniting AI, actual title plant data, and trusted human expertise, WFG is not simply automating tasks. It is advancing a smarter, more scalable, and more reliable model for title production that reduces friction, improves lender performance, and delivers a better, more predictable experience for borrowers.